Peter Oborne is the Daily Telegraph's chief political commentator.

After Tony Blair's failure, Baroness Ashton should be the next Middle East envoy

After a great deal of procrastination, David Cameron has at last chosen the UK’s next European Commissioner. Jonathan Hill, the former Leader of the Lords, is a much wiser choice than many critics have suggested. He is competent, unobtrusive and knows exactly how bureaucracies work.

Like Lord Hill, she was mocked and chastised at the time of her appointment. But she has become one of the finest commissioners that Britain has ever sent to Brussels.

She has a large share of the responsibility for the Serbia-Kosovo peace deal, and played an invaluable role in keeping the nuclear negotiations with Iran on the road through very difficult times.

She was the only negotiator fully trusted by the Iranian foreign minister Mohammed Javed Zarif. If a deal eventually does get struck, Baroness Ashton will deserve a very great deal of the credit. The lovely thing about her is that she would probably never dream of claiming it. She works quietly behind the scenes and knows how to massage egos, rather than build up her own.

It would be a great pity if this admirable lady were lost to international diplomacy. If I was Ed Miliband, I might well be inclined to appoint her shadow foreign secretary, rather than the invisible and increasingly pointless Douglas Alexander. This would exploit the fact that she is one of the few people in the world whose calls will be returned instantly by the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry.

But I have a better idea. Tony Blair has been Middle East envoy for seven years, during which period he has achieved almost nothing. The former prime minister flies in for a day or two on high profile visits, at most a couple of times a month, and is off again almost before he arrives. He is very close to the Israeli leadership, the morally bankrupt Gulf states, and now the bloodstained military government in Egypt. Very few Palestinians trust him.

In any case, he has been doing the job seven years – longer than anyone should. I think that the next envoy needs to return to the approach of the original envoy Sir James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank.

He did not just fly in to the Middle East, he lived there. He got engaged personally in a way that Blair simply has not been prepared to do. Above didn’t use the role as a crutch to project himself onto the world stage, he just got on with the job. All the evidence suggests that Baroness Ashton would address the role in a similar fashion. Unlike Blair, the Palestinians are likely to regard Baroness Ashton as impartial and lacking a wider agenda.

I believe that she could do tremendous work as a special envoy to the Middle East, as she has already done in Kosovo, Serbia and Iran. The world is crying out for a Middle East envoy who is genuinely impartial and prepared to put in the hours.